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Obama’s Auto Bailout Was Really a Hefty Union Payoff

Obama’s Auto Bailout Was Really a Hefty Union Payoff →

GM did go bankrupt – filing for Chapter 11 protection against its creditors on June 1, 2009. It’s what happened next that the president can take credit for – a handout of $49.5 billion in taxpayer money to GM, some $27 billion of which remains outstanding, and another $17 billion to its financial arm Ally Financial, which still owes $14.7 billion.

Where did that money go? Mainly, it went to paying off debts owed by GM and Chrysler, and – in an historic distortion of our bankruptcy proceedings – to securing the pensions and livelihoods of UAW workers. It turns out the real debt was that of Mr. Obama to organized labor, which had ponied up some $400 million to help him defeat John McCain.

The Obama administration strong-armed the auto companies’ creditors into accepting undeniably unfair terms – terms that saw pensions obliterated for non-union workers but saved for those carrying a UAW card. Terms that saw non-UAW shops close but UAW factories stay open. Terms that doled out ownership in GM with political favoritism as a guiding principle.

These charges are not at issue. In the government-managed reorganization of GM, bond holders (secured bond holders, who normally are at the top of the pay-out chart) were given equity in the carmaker at a price of $2.7 billion per one percent ownership. The government ended up paying $834 million for every one percent it claimed; the UAW paid only $629 million.

It was not only the ownership share that was skewed towards the UAW. As jobs began to come back, it was the UAW plants that kicked into high gear. Workers at GM’s plant in Moraine, Ohio, who had been laid off in 2007, were not included in the re-hiring. Why? Because they did not belong to the UAW. The Moraine plant was reportedly one of GM’s most productive, but under the terms of GM’s reorganization, its workers were “banned from transferring to other plants,” according to Sharon Terlep at The Wall Street Journal.

Moraine was not the only non-UAW facility to fall under the knife; a truck plant in Ontario organized by the Canadian Auto Workers also went down.